"Cheers!"
The glasses went up together and the noise that followed filled the tavern. The owner watched from behind the counter and smiled.
"Brother Yuji, my father told me to take you as a role model after hearing about the front lines. The whole village came out this morning and you were walking in the front row. Incredible."
The table was full of Genin, most of them fresh Academy graduates, all talking over each other. A few were older than Yuji. Two of them had been in his graduating class and were still Genin, which they were doing their best not to think about too hard.
Yuji had organized this himself. He had been away for more than a year, and Pakura had just graduated and become a Genin, both reasons were worth marking. She had pulled together some of her own friends and a handful of Yuji's closer ones, and Yuji was paying for all of it, which surprised no one who knew him.
The return to the village that morning had been something different from what he expected. When Arai had led them back the first time, the welcome had been arranged deliberately by the higher-ups.
This time the villagers had come on their own. The Third Kazekage had appeared alongside the other senior leadership and publicly commended those who had distinguished themselves, Rasa at the front, as was fitting, given that it was under his command that Sunagakure had held against Iwagakure this long.
Yuji and Sasori had received their share of recognition as well, and the atmosphere in the village had carried a quality he hadn't expected, something lifted, some weight that had been sitting over the place since the war ended finally giving way a little.
Forcing Iwagakure to the negotiating table had meant something to people beyond the military outcome.
What had moved Yuji more than any of it was watching the soldiers reunite with their families at the gate. The village had come out largely because family members had come to collect their own. That was the real reason for the crowd.
He had tried to bring Sasori along. Sasori had declined, which was the expected outcome and probably the right call for everyone's enjoyment.
Yuji had no family waiting for him, so the reunion atmosphere belonged to others. He had the table instead.
"I genuinely could not tell when we were in school," one of his classmates said, the envy in his voice only partially concealed. "There was one assessment where my scores were better than yours."
"Stop trying to find comfort where there isn't any. Yuji is going to be Kazekage someday. You'll be running village errands."
"Excuse me?! We were in the same class, if he can reach that level, I can't fall too far behind. I've decided. Starting today I'm going to train seriously and pass the Chunin exam."
"Sure you are."
The table erupted. Pakura was laughing. Yuji sat in the middle of it and let the noise wash over him, genuinely content.
The stories from the front would spread through the village over the coming weeks, passed from the returning shinobi to everyone they knew. For his generation, the gap between where Yuji stood and where anyone else did had already become difficult to measure.
"Becoming Kazekage must be your dream, right?" one of the older Genin asked, grinning.
It was the standard dream. The Academy put it in you early and the atmosphere kept it alive.
"You're giving me too much credit." Yuji laughed and rubbed the back of his head.
"My performance out there was okay at best. Compared to Shimizu and the others, the people actually making the strategic calls, running the deployments, I was nowhere near that level. The reason we won was their planning. I was just along for the ride."
Pakura looked at him flatly. "What a performance."
The table laughed again. Somehow the modesty made him seem more at ease rather than less, and the mystery it left behind suited him perfectly.
Pakura set her glass down and looked at Yuji with complete seriousness. "If you don't have the ambition to become Kazekage, I'll lose all respect for you."
The corner of Yuji's mouth twitched.
"There are plenty of people in the village stronger than me. And honestly, being Kage doesn't seem like a good deal, too many affairs, too many things to weigh up constantly.
It would wear out your brain for nothing. It's just not right for me." He scratched his cheek and coughed.
"No ambition," Pakura said.
Yuji said nothing.
"Well. Even if you had become Kage, I would have replaced you eventually anyway. I'm going to be the greatest Kazekage this village has ever had.
You could barely have been considered a rival. But since you've taken yourself out of the running on your own, I have nothing left to worry about." She closed her eyes and delivered this with the composed certainty of someone who had already settled the matter internally.
As a daughter of one of the village's established clan factions, Pakura had grown up with information and expectations the others at this table hadn't.
The ambition had likely taken root in her long before she could have named it. In the years ahead, her performance and military record would make her the foremost kunoichi in Sunagakure's history, remarkable enough that she would eventually register as a genuine concern to Rasa himself.
"Then I'll congratulate Lady Pakura in advance on her future Kazekage appointment," Yuji said, raising his glass with a grin.
"Cheers!"
The glasses went up again in a burst of noise and laughter. Pakura's face went red. The teasing in Yuji's voice had been obvious, and the others had laughed it off without a second thought, nobody at this table was taking her seriously.
She pressed her fists together under the table and made a quiet decision that this group of people would one day look at her very differently.
The conversation moved on to other things. People their age had little patience for serious topics and no particular interest in sustaining them.
Yuji settled into the noise and found he genuinely liked it, the looseness of it, the absence of anything that needed to be managed or calculated.
Sunagakure had its own character. The faction dynamics here were nothing like Konoha's layered internal politics. Even among teenagers, you could speak plainly without navigating around sensitivities that had nothing to do with the person in front of you.
In Konoha, a shinobi with an unusual background or inconvenient talent could find themselves quietly excluded by their own peers regardless of ability. That was practically a tradition there. Here the air moved more freely.
The meal stretched from afternoon into night before the group finally broke apart and went their separate ways.
With the Iwagakure front settled, the external pressure on the village had fallen to its lowest point in years.
What remained was the Hidden Mist, which had been running harassment operations along the coastal areas of the Land of Wind for some time, scraping profit from villages and towns that couldn't adequately defend themselves, making a quiet war fortune while the major villages spent themselves fighting each other.
Kirigakure had emerged from the Ninja World War having spent less than anyone else, and that surplus translated into a certain freedom to cause trouble elsewhere. The coastal harassment served strategic purposes beyond the immediate gains, it bought speaking rights and initiative at relatively low cost.
But for the Hidden Sand Village, the worst was behind them. The dawn of something resembling peace was finally visible on the horizon.
In the years that followed, compared to the grinding darkness of the war period, the conflicts across the ninja world would be considerably milder. All five of the great villages could draw breath and begin rebuilding. A brief era of relative peace settled over the world.
Brief, and not entirely peaceful, but a pause nonetheless.